Narrowband IoT Based Support Functions in Smart Cities

Abstract

This paper shows the main supporting roles of narrowband Internet of things (NBIoT) in the smart cities. This research work will consider the cases in which there already exists some infrastructure for the smart city operations. NBIoT is used to improve the overall functions and to ease the process of resource management. Smart city initiatives are extremely popular in the developed world. In the developing countries too, it gains popularity in the recent years. There are a lot of tasks in the smart city initiatives. It covers the basic services such as water and electricity distribution, maintenance of streetlights, city traffic management, garbage management, and support in effective policing. It also provides the advanced services such as the safety and surveillance monitoring, smart healthcare, location and tracking based services, and smart vehicular networking services. Several information and communication technology-based services are used to assist in these functions. It has been found that IoT is exemplary in these service provision operations. For large scale deployment of IoT a lot of resources are needed. Now, it is well known that NBIoT is one of the resource efficient versions of IoT. It is suitable for large scale deployment in projects like smart cities and smart grids. This article shows that, NBIoT can assist in the smart city functions to a large extent.